


Exposure

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [15]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: AU if it makes you feel better, Aragorn would not tell people to drink bleach, Dr. Fauci but make him the Warden, Drabble Sequence, Fourth Age, Gen, Houses of Healing, Medicine, Minas Tirith, Pandemics, The plague, Xenophobia, You'd better believe that Faramir would wear a face mask, public health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:20:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25727332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: Plague comes to Middle-earth in the Fourth Age. A drabble sequence.
Series: Do No Harm [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/16704
Comments: 20
Kudos: 17





	1. Autumn

_Honey, you’re familiar, like my mirror years ago  
Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword  
Innocence died screaming; honey, ask me, I should know  
I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door_  
“From Eden,” Hozier

 _I am gonna make it through this year  
if it kills me_  
“This Year,” The Mountain Goats

**emergence**

It surfaces, as these things do, in scattered rumors and stray reports. Clusters of ague and ache spring up here and there in the lower circles of Minas Tirith, in crowded guild-halls and cramped wooden houses. A few of the butcher-shops and charnel houses stand quiet, emptied as their workers lie abed. Some deaths, but this is nothing remarkable—a product of the cold, of huddling close around fire grates in the close, sooty air.

Come spring, people say, when the sun warms the stones, the damp and the chill shall abate, and with them, the illness.

  
It does not.

**creep**

For the City breathes like a live thing, daily taking in travelers, merchants, messengers, armed companies, exhaling the same in equal measure and equivalent rhythms. Within the walls, women, men, and children trundle up and down the circles, treading the worn stone steps for labor, commerce, pleasure, duty.

They carry many things, baskets and sacks in arms: books, candles, bread, gossip, meat, yarn, fruit, music, money, paving-stones, wine, disappointment.

And other things. The air in their lungs, for one, and the traces—unseen, unnoticed--of anything they have brushed up against, anything they have handled: dust, water, blood, spittle, bile.

**turn**

Clusters of ill grow: here, a whole household laid low, there an ale-house or workshop with all its staff stricken.

Beds in the Houses of Healing begin to fill: slowly, at first; it’s a long trek from the lower levels to the wards, and those living nearer the ground may find it easier to suffer at home.

The numbers grow faster and faster after one busy market day. And then, of a sudden, the sickness has climbed to the Sixth Circle, at last plain for the eyes of those who can cast their gaze down the height of the City.

**wellspring**

As the count of the stricken rises, whispers of speculation on the source:

The air, some say—sickness lingering, unseen, in clouds, most likely over the lower circles, where the air’s bound up in dust and smoke.

Others claim tainted meat, bad water—easy to imagine something swirling in the cool dark of the cisterns, gathering at the mouths of fountains and pumps.

Then there are murmurs, glances in the direction of the newcomers, the Southerners, who’ve been filling the empty quarters of those rebuilt lower circles: _The illness arrived with them. Before, we’d not seen the like, had we?_

**signs**

The King summons the Warden of the Houses of Healing, who relays to the council what he has seen, what healer after healer has told him.

The first symptoms are common: ague, ache, chills. On some, sores spring up; on others, a rash. Many lie ill for days or a week, then get up, weakened and scarred.

But others won’t rise again: the tremors grow sharp; the fever rises. They burn up inside their skins, lesions at their mouth, gasping beneath their blankets.

“I’ve seen the like, some years past,” the Warden says, “but not this many. Never this fast.”

**inside**

(The Warden tells what he knows. What he doesn’t express—for now, before King and Council, is neither the time nor place—is how it is to sit at bedsides, to feel the illness shift beneath your hands. It is heat, the healers say, a fever that yields not to cool water or draughts of willow-bark. Patients’ eyes grow vague, and many tremble with a violence that startles even the veterans of the Houses.

All this, from without. What say the afflicted, themselves? A burning, they say, and a weight on the chest. A desperate pressing in of the breath.)

**precedent**

The archive-keepers scour the shelves, spreading out yellowed volumes, unfolding papers. Records of the last Age’s Great Plague, that plundered Gondor’s cities and left her flank unguarded, costing them King and Tree.

The Queen needs no records; she remembers, though Imladris lay beyond its reach in the end.

“Lay it out, thus,” she bids, unrolling a map. They plot dates and death-counts, transgressing inked borders, paper forests. “See how it moved.”

“Flowing out from the East,” says a councilor. “A breath of evil.”

“Following the trade-routes and waterways,” she says, tracing the marks. “Where life went, so did it.”

**flight**

Many with the coin and freedom to do so, soon depart the City, saddlebags and wains laden for long sojourns. To elude the source, whatever that may be, they reason, the mountain and tower at their backs. The make for the sea, the plains, the cleaner and freer air.

(But many more are bound, and must remain in place.)

And so the sickness spreads, bleeding into Lossarnach and Lebennin, Pelargir and Dol Amroth. A trail of death spreading south and west, borne as if a poison down the Anduin where the river is broad, neglecting none of its braided mouths.

**kingsfoil**

“I think it not as the breath of Mordor, my lord,” the Warden warns. “Still, all’s worth trying.”

So the King descends to the wards, bids herbs be prepared. Lays hands to the fevered brows and laboring breasts of the ailing.

They wait some time, afterward, to be sure. But though it may console the sufferers, to see their liege at their bedside, the sickness does not abate. Not after an hour, nor a day.

So Elessar looks again to the Warden, nods confirmation of what both had already guessed: a plague of Men. An affliction for this new Age.

**prince**

“I will remain here,” the Steward tells his King. “The easier that I may serve.” Messages across the river grow slower, now, and sparse.

But Elessar shakes his head. “Return you to Ithilien, and there with the Lady make fast the settlements.” A pause, and then: “Plague once shifted the nation’s seat from Osgiliath to Minas Anor. It may once again shift back, should we come to that.” The two men regard one another a long while, ere the younger nods.

Before he leaves, Faramir makes to bow, but the King instead moves towards him, clasps his hand in his.

**roster**

The Warden dismisses the youngest of the healers, apprentices of thirteen and fourteen. The rest he arrays in the atrium.

“You are the vanguard,” he says. “Death is coming for us once again, and this time it will come for you, first. Children you have, and husbands and wives. Go now if you wish to be released; you will bear no ill will from me.”

No one moves.

Later, he waits for the leavers to come to him singly, not wanting to bear the disapprobation of their peers.

All stay.

He goes into his office, shuts the door, and weeps.

**choke**

“Shut the gates,” Elessar commands. Messengers have ridden out, bearing warnings to allies and neighbors: none now may leave or enter, save those bearing urgent parlay or much-needed provisions.

To throttle the plague, they’ll close the City’s throat. And what’s more, the airways within: constrict the traffic between circles, Guardsmen posted at doorways and stairways: slowing all of Minas Tirith in its tracks.

The cries go up: “Sealed living in our tomb,” some say.

“Tomb or not, it stops here,” comes the reply. “We rise or fall as one.”

And like a once-restive beast, the City quiets. For a time.


	2. Winter

**seclusion**

“As the City’s made itself fast, so would I urge my Lord,” the Warden counsels.

And though he likes not to govern from behind closed doors and rule by missive, the King must agree. Gondor can ill afford to lose another King, not so soon, not with his heir so young.

The royal apartments are made sparse, aides dismissed.

There’s time now to think: on all the years he spent hidden, or hiding, in anonymity or beneath the cloak of an assumed name. This time is different--nevertheless, bitter and strange it is, to be on the retreat once more.

**charm**

Throughout the City, in alcoves and alleyways, strange little shrines spring up. Small offerings: bits of what greenery is found this time of year, candles and rough grey circle tokens. Appeals to Estë for healing—failing that, for rest. Even the elders cannot remember a time when such altars were general—not in such proliferation, nor with such specificity.

A few of the healers, of all people, dispute this, ready for combat: “We must call to Tulkas, for happy warriors, we.”

Others reply, “Yes, but pray he walks hand and hand with Her.”

And all the while, the sickness feeds.

**reach**

Lone messengers approach the Gates; sentries take their missives, offer food and drink, but do not bid them enter.

News from far afield: the sickness now is in Rohan, in Tharbad, the Shire, Harondor, Umbar. It’s bad, they say, in Hobbiton, in Dale and Edoras. Anywhere houses stand close, where neighbors meet often in market and pasture.

But nowhere so bad as in the White City, with homes and hearths stacked one to the other, your ceiling the same planks as your neighbors’ floor, their footfalls in your ear all the day.

In the Houses, the wards begin to overflow.

**reckon**

We’ll make such count as we can, says the King.

So guardsmen and clerks fan out, street to street and house to house, tallying the ill and the dead. Like the archive-keepers, they, too, make their maps. But these charts are as a living thing, the marks upon them daily growing and spreading: a malignance over the City.

Over the door of each house where sickness has fallen, they paint a warning: an _X_ , dark and red as blood. So that each stricken home is as a City unto itself, where none may leave or enter.

Undertakers follow close behind.

**portion**

The City has known war, has known siege and hunger. Her leaders have seen stores lain by with each harvest, and it is to these they turn.

Rations are passed to the shut-ins, through cracked windows and doors held ajar: dense loaves and salted meats, what precious fruits have been dried and preserved through the cold weather. No feast, these, but enough, for now, to sustain life for the living. And these are taken with good humor (at first, at least): “So, this be the bread of our affliction.”

And some—many, actually—long just as much for strong drink.

**consort**

The Queen fields messages from her brothers, precious and few.

News from abroad: the peoples of Imladris, of Mirkwood and Lórien have some afflicted among them; mostly youths, such as they have after so many have sailed West. They hear it is much the same among Dúrin’s folk.

They fare not as poorly as her adopted land, it seems. Here, the sickness takes all: the young and old, yes, but so too, men and women in their prime. And though she ails not (yet), she feels more strongly now the weight of Lúthien’s choice, the keening edge of her song.

**rites**

Gravediggers and pallbearers, their ranks dwindling, cannot move swiftly enough. In decent times, the dead (those of too small a name to warrant laying in stone, that is) are put to rest in the earth, in neat graves beyond the City walls.

Now, at first, trenches are dug, and bodies lain within them shoulder to shoulder. None attend them save the laborers, nor stand over these mounds to weep.

Then, when this, too, proves too trying, they kindle the funeral fires. As it was during the War. Smoke rises; no din of battle to rise above the crackle of flames.

**poison**

The rumors yet spread and grow, fast as the plague—sometimes, faster.

The swiftest ones seize on real and visible things--real bodies, real faces: _‘Twas the dark foreigners brought this—they suffer not, but only pass it to us. Their ways are strange—they seek for our blood._

Words metastasize to deeds: windows smashed, houses torched. No one owns to these acts.

“We will _not_ have this,” says the King. “Law will be kept.” He dispatches the Guard to keep watch, but their ranks, too, have been thinned. In what homes of theirs remain, Southrons huddle in twofold fear.

**heroics**

Healers and herbalists ransack the gardens and storerooms, searching for something—anything—that may aid. Some tinctures ease the fever or lessen the rash, but naught else. Other draughts act as purgatives, but expel not sickness or death.

“Were that Ioreth were here,” the elder women say to one another. Their wise-woman—hers was the true wealth of the Houses: knowledge and lore. And hope.

“Just as well she left peacefully,” say some. For she passed many summers ago, her cousin at her side. “Were she here, she’d have fought to her last breath.”

“We should all be so lucky.”

**here**

Some patients suffocate, wide-eyed, chins flecked with drool. Healers press their ears to stricken chests and necks, trying to discover where the air strains and stops.

Then one of the surgeons says, “There,” and plunges a scalpel into the throat of a gasping child, hairsbreadths from an artery—angles a hollow needle into the neat red gape. She stanches the blood, holds her own breath until she hears it: the reedy whistle of a new, unnatural airway.

“Never,” she exhales, gripping the edge of the table. “I’ll not do that, again.”

But she does.

(The child dies—but of fever.)

**abide**

In Ithilien, the White Lady sees that the households are provisioned, the garrisons manned. Ill news trickles in slowly from her brother’s house in Edoras; worse, still, comes from the Citadel of Minas Tirith.

Here, across the river, they fare better, but are far from untouched.

She thinks of her pledge, of her ambition to heal. She dreamt then of verdancy; of abundance, and ease. Of peace.

Now she stands in the gardens with her husband, now arrayed before an enemy they cannot see nor rightly take the measure of. And she wishes for grey adamant. A fastness—a shield.

**ways**

Charlatans emerge from the woodwork, peddling dubious cures, false promises. Most serve to relieve the gulled of nothing but their coin.

Others, though, are dire in their audacity, and grow more so as the plague wears on: tinctures of nightshade, copious bloodletting. Cautery, and lye on skin, so that now the living burn, as well as the dead.

King and Council move to punish the quacks and ban their treatments, but only so much can be done, these days. In the Houses, healers and herbalists throw up their hands: “How can we stop them, when we’ve nothing better to offer?”

**casualty**

The healers soon begin to drop, falling feverish into the same beds they tended the day before. One by one at first, then stricken in twos and threes. Some try to make light: “No worse patient than a doctor, it’s said.” Others are silent, putting their remaining mettle towards survival.

Others still do not report for shifts. Whether they lie abed at home, or their early courage failed them, the Warden cannot say, for he has not the time nor manpower to search them out.

Instead, he rolls up his sleeves, takes his place on the wards beside his staff.

**means**

“Try everything,” the Warden says.

The Council lifts the ban on dissection; surgeons splay corpses on tables, lift organs. In some, lungs are heavy with fluid; in others, no visible marks of sickness within, only pallor and wear.

Without, rumors abound: of bodies desecrated, and, worse, patients sliced open while still drawing breath. “Better to the funeral-fires than to the butchers,” goes the cry in streets: a ragged rabble masses before the entryway of the Houses. The staff bars the doors, can only wait for the Guard to disperse the mob.

They do, but not before one man falls slain.

**absent**

Guardsmen keep the quarantine, barring gates, marking doors, clearing streets, distributing rations. Now exhorting, now threatening. Captain Bergil, in turn, keeps order among their dwindling ranks.

“Remember your oath to King and country,” he tells those men, surly and frightened, who would turn away.

“To defend,” they retort, “not to turn sword on our own people, nor await slaughter before a foe we cannot fight.”

In ordinary times, desertion calls for death. Yet Bergil cannot bring himself to pronounce it. Instead he banishes the disobedient to cells growing ever more crowded. Later he realizes that death awaits them there, too.

**descend**

For such are the fear and rage of the City: anger at the plague, and at those tasked with stemming and treating it, at those accused of bringing it within the walls.

Deepest and hardest of all is the fury over a thing stolen: Did not our fathers fight and toil for years, did not we wager all in the last Age, so that our children might grow old in peacetime? Was not their City to be Minas Anor, of old? Theirs the sunlight, and not the stronghold?

The sickness, indifferent, absorbs all of their rancor. Deals it back stronger.

**still**

The City and the land lie fallow and wrung.

Armed outposts go unmanned, though this now matters little, for any would-be foes are likewise afflicted.

Shops and taverns stand dark and vacant, their boarded windows as closed eyes.

Boats bob, empty, in their moorings, fishing nets folded away.

There is mourning in every street, perhaps in every home: what census-takers can still work, no longer mark doors, for little use it does when in the end every house bears an _X_.

The people know, as does their King, that hope dies last. But when it, too, dies, it dies hard.


	3. Spring

**offering**

They’re escorted to the Houses by a pale young clerk: a small group of Southerners, nervous and dark-eyed. They come before the Warden.

“In our youth,” begins the oldest, a man, “was a sickness in some ways like this one. But many survived. We took it into our bodies.” Something rich and sharp in his accent.

“I don’t understand,” the Warden says; his head aches. One of the women steps forward, shows him the scars on her hands, describes a ritual whose workings he cannot grasp: “’Twould sicken you, would it not?”

Gently, she says. That you may rise stronger.

**clear**

“But why now?” asks the Warden, heavy with weariness. “Why wait so long?”

“We tried, ere this,” says the old man. “And we were rebuffed: mere foreign fancies, they said.”

“We were afraid,” adds another. “Our houses burned; some of our kin warned us not to go here, today.”

“Ah.” The Warden knows not what to say. “I am sorry.” He looks at the clerk who brought them: “Yet you did not turn them back.”

“I saw,” says the young man, and unfolds his map: there, in the foreigners’ quarters, small clusters of streets unlittered by the marks of death.

**defy**

The healers, bone-tired and mourning dawn ‘til dusk, are unbelieving.

’Tis madness—a trick, some say. It may well be deadly. It may even be a ruse, to keep us on our knees now we’ve been felled.

But a few have quiet words with the foreigners, ask them questions. For it’s not gone unnoticed: those who sicken but recover are rarely afflicted again.

But it still seems not as a real thing to them, until one of the women, lean and bereft, steps forward: “I lost my daughter; make your marks on me, and I’ll endure this in her honor.”

**opening**

So they do as the Southerners instruct: cut the back of the patient’s hand; from the afflicted, harvest a sore; slip this into the incision. Then, bind the wound and wait.

Soon, they say, you’ll fall ill, but you’ll not be taken. When the sickness leaves you, it comes not again.

A few healers offer themselves; the Warden’s loth to spare them.

Bergil of the Guard gets wind of the plan, says, “I’ve men in prison who’ll take this folly in exchange for freedom.” The Council approves.

So it happens that the first to be cut are nurses and deserters.

**crucible**

They wait.

Most of the marked take sick within a week, telltale lesions erupting on their hands, crawling up wrists and arms. Some do sicken badly; one, a freed prisoner, dies.

But most do not.

“This suggests, only,” cautious voices say. “It doesn’t declare, not yet. Try more, wait longer.”

“Suggestion’s all we have,” the Warden retorts, and he breathes deeply. The wards are yet overflowing, and he’s heard of dead lying in the streets, or shut in with the living. “It must be enough.” With the Southerners, he goes before the Council. And alone, he goes before the King.

**take**

“You think it sound?” asks the King.

“I think we must try.”

Elessar studies the Warden: this man who witnessed his arrival to Minas Tirith in the last Age, when Elessar came as a healer. The Steward and White Lady, the Ring-bearer and his kin, and thousands more through the years, came under his care. He’s guided his healers, steered the Houses through wartime and peace—the refuge of the City, her beating heart.

He’s aged since then; more, since the start of the plague; looks almost frail, now. But his back’s straight.

“Let it be so,” says the King.

**battle**

And now the healers fan out through the circles, door to door and street to street. Most of them are at the end of their strength, but they do their best to explain, to comfort, and cajole.

Most folk, grieved and disconsolate, still nursing rumors, cast a wary eye upon the healers with their scalpels and bandages, their strange foreign-found ways. Many refuse.

But some do not. Some accept, and the healers pray that here at last is some small beginning in a black season of endings.

And for many, many more, of course, it is already far too late.

**fade**

Even as the Southrons stood before him that day, the Warden had already felt the faint tongues of fever.

Now he lies abed. One by one, healers clasp his weakened hands, exhort him to fight. Many with tears in their eyes.

Don’t weep, he wants to tell them. He never wed, has no children; but he’s not been alone. He’s given all his life to these Houses and those who labor there: there’s no greater privilege than this.

He wants to tell them, but his breath is failing, and the light…

The healers, wrecked and inconsolable, go silent with grief.


	4. Summer

**kaddish**

What happens to a place, to its people, when it’s worn down as a rock in the current, when its songs have turned to dirge and lamentation, and its wine to vinegar? What survives in the eyes and the mouths of those who themselves are only just surviving, may not yet live out the year?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

A few shrines can still be seen, scattered and sparse. Still, they’re recognizable in their plaintiveness and their desire: that the source of Peace make peace for all who mourn, and peace for all who dwell within these walls.

**inventory**

Has anything been gained? And even so, at what cost? Surely nothing can be worth this tide of mourning: husbands bereft of wives, children left orphaned. Friends who’ll never meet again. Taken not in peace, but borne away by suffering from kin and lovers.

There’s knowledge, true: the new methods they’ve been gifted, most of all. Words will be set down, of the ways the sickness travels, through the body and through the masses who dwell in city and village. New healers are trained now en masse, rather than singly.

But even these things are bitterly won, their consolations cool.

**sequellae**

There’s no moment of triumph, no horn-call or message on eagle’s wings. The Age for such wonders is over.

Some reckon that the City’s lost every fourth person who dwelt there; others say it was every third.

Only a slow series of emergences. Short exhalations. Things shambling, piecemeal, back into the half-light:

A few doors and windows, unboarded.

More people, here and there, accepting the marks offered by the healers.

And what of the foreigners, dwelling in such a place that has struck them, spurned their lore? Many will leave, but some will stay—this, perhaps, the greatest of wonders.

**graven**

The King greets again his City. Quietly, without fanfare.

He sees houses, some lit within, others darkened.

Healers, Southron and Gondorian, toiling together. Soon he’ll dispatch some abroad, to fight and teach.

Here and there, fresh-carved words. Names, some on new-risen slabs, others etched on walls, archways. Those lately committed to the earth or the flames, so that some part of them will endure—at least ‘til such time as the weather wears them down.

At the Houses’ entryway, a long list: he finds the name he seeks, reaches for it. The letters rough and solid beneath his newly-scarred hand.


	5. Epilogue

Someday—we can only hope—beyond the years and walls, we’ll stand again in sunlight.

Someday we’ll lie together in the grass. We’ll know the story, and remember: how the fever bent us and closed our throats. How it wore away the flesh to show, beneath, where the bones had been rotting.

We’ll know and we’ll remember, but someday, in some moments, at least, we’ll not have to speak it aloud.

Someday we’ll lie, for a time, beyond the reach of the words, beyond the bounds of skin and blood.

Somewhere beyond these things, a field.

I’ll meet you there.

_May to August, 2020_


	6. Notes

My fictional Fourth Age plague is not intended as a direct analogue to any specific disease in the real world. Its epidemiology and pathology (specifically, the profusion of skin sores and resulting secondary infections of the upper and lower respiratory tracts) are loosely based on those of smallpox and _Haemophilus influenzae_ serotype B (Hib). The method introduced by the Southrons is based on variolation, which was used to induce immunity against smallpox as early as the mid-Sixteenth Century in China, and possibly earlier (source).

As far as I can tell, Tolkien was not terribly specific on the exact nature of the Great Plague of the Third Age, nor the methods of its transmission—only that it spread out in several directions from Mordor, and had a high death toll. I took some license in implying that while it may have been a form of biological warfare from Mordor, it was also transmitted person-to-person ( **precedent** ).

The idea for the Valarin cults and for competing appeals to Estë and Tulkas ( **charm** ) is lifted from Dwimordene’s story “Fatality,” which in turn was inspired by a prompt from Himring.

The text of the final drabble is adapted from Rumi’s poem “Out Beyond Ideas.”

Thanks to Pandemonium for early encouragement and ideas.

While this story is far from extensively researched, here are some things I’ve read recently, and/or while writing, that helped me to frame my thoughts and provided some inspiration, as it were:

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John M. Barry

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Steven Johnson

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, Lindsey Fitzharris

“How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds”, Lawrence Wright

Sheri Fink’s reporting

***

For whatever it’s worth, this is dedicated to all of the healers—of all kinds—that I have the privilege of knowing. With my outrage and gratitude.


End file.
